Zeno Chen has worked on photography for more than 10 years. He started with documentary photography to discover host-guest relationship between objects being photographed through camera lenses and in recent years, he has used photographed objects as imaging source materials, superposing and slicing them to transform into subjective artist-intervened imaging that portrays a unique poetic experience in a new sense of aesthetics.

A major part of contemporary photography centers on mise-en-scène, rendering imaging only as a terminal medium and photography or artist’s intervention in imaging fades to the rear end. On the front line of conveying consciousness, it presents viewers with the scene existing in imaging based on the prerequisite of image authenticity. In Zeno Chen’s works, however, imaging is presented in the front line of artistic portrayal. He purposely makes imaging complanate and eliminates spatial implication in his works to deny existence of the scene and cut the bonds with reality, attempting subjective creation works completely out of his consciousness. Such a creation style is traced back to pure context of using imaging as picture communication, laying emphasis on chemistry between imaging response. Zeno Chen superposes more than 10 imaging layers, establishing a delicate and rich visual texture, and creates new pragmaticality with Montage’s shock cutting and sequence editing through proportion adjustment and composition arrangement between layers. Of the contemporary trend in photography, Zeno Chen appears unique.

If we boldly simplify change in contemporary art as transition from creation intention to intentionality, then Zeno Chen’s imaging works provide a new creation direction with semi-literature imaging communication. Different from many contemporary works based on personal rigmarole, Zeno Chen’s works avoid overly dogmatic reference specified by artists and establish a set of image logic to invoke viewers’ visual experience that offers them self-interpretation of the artworks by following Zeno Chen’s narrative pattern. Viewing Zeno Chen’s works is a complicated visual experience. He uses images recorded in daily life as sources and establishes a strong visual style of artist’s intervention by digital techniques as if they were manually selected and transformed. In the age of mechanical reproduction, his works glitter with a miraculous artistic aura that has never been spotted.